The influencers are lying to us! (But first buy my $199 course and I’ll tell you more…)
Shocking, I know. But the problem is much worse than we think.
This article is part of a two part series.
Part 1 (below): Why it matters
Part 2 (here): What we can do about it
It was the (relatively) early days of the pandemic, August 2020. My wife was pregnant, she and I were both working full-time jobs, raising our 1.5 year old son, and were now quarantining with my in-laws. It was, without a doubt, a very stressful time globally, politically, and in our daily lives.
I had been running a small social impact consultancy and community for the previous two years. We were of course worried about navigating COVID, but the business was solid. I thought for the most part, we’d be ok.
And that’s when I discovered him….
His name was Jack Butcher.
His black and white visualizations hooked me. His quotes on life from Steve Jobs, Naval, Gandhi, spoke to my existing love of inspirational wallpapers. (“Yes, I know! IF WE HAD ASKED THEM THEY WOULD HAVE ONLY WANTED A FASTER HORSE,” I’d whisper under my breath will browsing his wallpaper quotes.)
I became familiar with his work with Visualize Value. He was growing a large following and quickly. I bought one of his courses ($300), got access to the community (1K+ members at the time), bought a 1-on-1 60 minute session with Jack himself (for $500) and I was off to the races — I was one of them!
My life would be set. Or so I thought….
(I of course didn’t think my life would be set, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t excited and buying into the enthusiasm / hype.)
My exposure to Jack Butcher led me to the Justin Welsh, Sahil Bloom, Daniel Vassallo, and Dickie Bushes of the world. And suddenly, they were everywhere. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram — everywhere I turned I ran into their content, their courses, their products, their faces.
If I ONLY bought their courses, signed up for their newsletter, did what they told me to do 7 times a day on Twitter, I too could have an amazing, profitable, passive income, stress-free solopreneur, pretending-to-solve-real-problems life!
I purchased courses from Daniel and Justin. I wanted to see what they were all about, too. (I mean you can’t just go down one rabbit hole, right?)
And so I went deep. Hundreds of dollars and hours later, I was in the rabbit holes of solpreneurship, building once selling twice, productization, building in public, and learning how to grow an audience online.
And let’s just say, it’s an ugly world.
There is definitely value in the courses and materials. But the negative consequences, I fear, vastly outweigh the positives.
(For context, my company, The Impactful, is a network of marketers, creators, designers, solopreneurs, and creators. Founded in 2017, it’s not like I’m driving totally blind when it comes to freelance, solopreneurship, building a business, etc. Still much to learn, and a small business, but it wasn’t like I was a high school student reading / taking their courses.)
Before you write this off as abject criticism, hear me out.
‘Build in Public’ is total bullsh**
You can follow the hashtags #buildinpublic and see it smattered all over Twitter. Engineers, developers, creators, talking about building in public.
The idea is quite simple: share your journey.
Whatever it is you are creating, share the steps — the starts, the finishes, the challenges and the opportunities. Let people peer behind the curtain. In turn, they will learn and feel a part of the successes.
In principle, a great idea that I fully support. In practice, and an awful practice no less, it’s dangerous.
Build in public creators are lauded for their transparency, vulnerability, and oversharing.
The main problem with building in public, when the Justin Welshs, the Jack Butchers, and the Dickie Bushs share and peer back their own curtains so we can see how the sauce is made, so we can see THEIR revenue numbers (“WOW, so much $$!”), and see how little they have to work to generate huge returns is that: it is a lie.
It’s not a lie in the sense that revenue numbers, profits, are a lie. Those are most likely to be accurate. (A side note, as someone who has a masters degree in Accounting, I personally LOVE when MRR — monthly recurring revenue- is shared as the main metric… I don’t care if your MRR is $5M, if your Monthly Spend is $6M, it’s not looking too hot… interesting how expenses always get left out…but I digress).
The transparency of build in public is a lie.
The influencer lie is in not giving us the true, full picture. And intentionally hiding the true determinants of success is, in fact, dangerous.
Peeling back one’s curtain, but not all the way to the important, privileged, true determinants of success and by intentionally picking and choosing what information to share and objectively leaving out other information, is in turn lying to us all.
The scale & scope might be different, but it’s no different than a corporation lying to its shareholders. We, are the investors and the shareholders of the influencers business.
Take for example, a study by the Boston College School of Law in 2018, entitled, “The Wealth Gap and the Racial Disparities in the Startup Ecosystem.”
The report found that:
The largest drivers of the racial wealth gap and the largest factors in contributing to the success of an entrepreneurial venture are (1) the ability to generate wealth and (2) home ownership.
White entrepreneurs tend to have two primary sources of that capital: their own wealth, which comes from homeownership, and the wealth of their network, which typically comes in the form of family wealth and/or inheritances.
Black entrepreneurs, by contrast, generally have less individual wealth because of low homeownership rates and less access to wealth in their networks, primarily.”
Let’s read that again.
“The largest factors in contributing to the success of an entrepreneurial venture are 1) the ability to generate wealth and 2) Home ownership. White entrepreneurs tend to have two primary sources of capital: their own wealth, which comes from home ownership, and the wealth of their network, which typically comes in the form of family wealth and/or inheritances.”
Despite what we read on Twitter every day, waking up at 5 am, hustling harder, out working your peers, creating Content Operating Systems, or LinkedIn Operating Systems, or Permissionless Apprenticeships, or buying the latest book, notion template, course, were not the factors that were going to lead to entrepreneurial success. Being white and rich are better.
When you say you are going to build in public and show how the sauce is made, determinants of wealth need to be shared.
We must acknowledge, address, and share our privileges. ESPECIALLY if you are going to pretend what you are sharing online is the full picture.
If you are a white, American, Christian male, you have an incredibly huge leg up on the rest of the world just by those determinants alone, just by being born as such, even totally ignoring one’s finances.
And let’s cut the crap. It makes a HUGE difference if you have $100,000 in the bank when you quit your job and can spend 6 months designing visuals or building your LinkedIn audience. The general public, especially for followers and builders of color or in developing countries are starting (unknowingly) 7–8 steps behind.
And let’s cut to one of my personal faves — Justin Welsh. (caveat: I purchased one Justin Welsh course and remained blocked by him on Twitter — but he’s a public profile so jokes on him!). Justin often mentions how he worked as an executive at a health-tech start up that was acquired. It’s safe to assume he had a nice little payout that coincidentally enabled him to dive full-time into a side hustle while not worrying about immediate income (again, according to studies literally the #1 determinant of a successful entrepreneur), yet clearly, he does not want to engage on the subject. Nor does he have any understanding of the privilege he possesses.
When I pressed him on this topic, both in a live webinar and on social media, shockingly his answers were vague, nondescript, and I was then blocked by him on Twitter (the tweet was not offense, not hurtful, merely asked how perhaps he could use his privilege to do more good).
Justin embodies the privileged building in public influencer endemic quite well. His tweets, emails, and courses are filled with actionable tips, insights, and frameworks for how he built his business.
But he wreaks of the proverbial, “if you just do what I tell you to do, you too can have this amazing success.” And it’s a dangerous lie we are all just fed up with.
But let me be clear: I am not saying everyone has to run around disclosing what is in their bank account, or what their net worth is — please god no.
But if you are going to “build in public” and share how quickly you grew your audience, how much revenue you have, how much product you sold, how you did it, the tools you used, well, we gotta see the full picture.
You can’t hide the top determinants of your success. You don’t get to chery pick what privilege you share and what privilege you hide. Even if that makes you slightly uncomfortable because it’s talking about race and privilege. Sorry!
You can’t ignore race, you can’t ignore access to capital , you can’t ignore what’s in your bank account. Because that stuff actually really maters.
This, this lack of understanding, admission, and recognition in the role privilege plays in entrepreneurial success — is where the lie begins to get dangerous.
In an influencers global audience, there are men and women of color, immigrants, those living and working in developing countries, those with literally $0 to their name, and those of whom are totally unaware of these privileges. Sure, we see surface level ones (white, American, etc) but on average, we have no idea how much access to capital, access to privilege any one of these influencer creators truly has. And it’s not a surprise its coincidentally omitted when everything else is shared in the name of transparency.
And when you’re following your influencers blueprint to success, there are tons of unintended consequences of having no clue your driving a bicycle and they’ve been driving a Ferrari this entire time.
The influencers don’t have our best interests in mind.
This one feels obvious, but took me a bit longer to understand.
At first, everything was about me, the customer! This course will help my business, this course will help ME build an audience, this lesson will help me be the better person, this course will FINALLY help me divorce my time from my money so I can lead a life just like Naval Ravikant…
But once you take the courses, access the community, have fleeting interactions with the influencers themselves (my one-on-one with Jack, the pre-blocking Twitter moments with Justin) that leave your heart fluttering, you realize: you and your success are NOT at the center of their machine.
You are merely a part of the machine.
You see, because the machine only works at scale, at volume. By simple math, if one sells a $100 course, if you want to make, say, $100,000 (a very livable but unfortunately not amazing income in the US these days), you need 1,000 of “you’s” to make a business. There are 2,000 working hours in a year (a metric commonly used — 40 hours a week x 50 weeks given 2 weeks standard vacation time). That means you can devote 2 hours ALL YEAR to each of your 1,000 customers. Follow this up the ladder and the math continues to point to: more customers, less engagement. Otherwise, it’s just not sustainable.
So your first realization is, ‘oh these tools are meant to help me, but I’m part of the larger system, a system that depends on scale. Ok got it.’
Then you find yourself in the content algorithms, DEEPER inside the machine. It is by no surprise that once you encounter a Justin Welsh, a Jack Butcher, a Dickie Bush, you begin to see them EVERYWHERE.
They are playing the algorithms of Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. And the algorithms need to be fed, and fed OFTEN. So much so it’s almost a joke. A Twitter content consultant recommend I tweet at least three times a day and comment on at least 20 influencers tweets, every single day. That’s 160+ tweets a week, at minimum. If it takes at least 5 minutes per tweet, let’s be generous, that’s 14 hours a week just on creating, not to mention consuming, Twitter content.
More content, more engagement, multiple times a day. And these influencers know how to play the system and play it well.
Take, for example, the following:
Tim Urban has 646,000 followers on Twitter. He’s a big deal and has one of the most famous Ted Talks of all time.
Sahil Bloom, one of my influencers in question, has 700,000+ followers on Twitter, even more than Tim.
But without fail, you can go through Tim’s timeline and see time after time, Sahil’s comment as one of the first to appear after a Tim tweet. Exhibit A and B:
To the average Twitter user, this seems innocent enough — Sahil loves Tim’s content! But to any of us that have gone down the rabbit hole, we know this is not a happy accident. Sahil has notifications set up when Tim tweets, and any time it is a tweet that is relavant to Shahil’s audience, he replies. Heck, there are so many AI tools now that it’s not even guaranteed Sahil’s responses are from him nor a human. This is known as ‘audience piggybacking’ and it happens all the time.
Should Tim’s tweet go viral, by commenting first, so in turn would Sahil by simply being in the right place at the right time. We have short attention spans so usually the first or second comment on a tweet gets the most engagement, especially as a tweet goes viral.
You can trace this throughout Twitter time and time again. We see everyone playing the game, working the algorithm.
The question to ask is, are we being told to build products and services that actually help people, or are we just being told to play the game in the name of capitalism, narcissism, and greed?
If you’re playing the numbers game, that’s fine I get it — don’t hate the player hate the game. But let’s stop pretending you’re the next Dalai Llama.
And then there’s the copy catting, the trolling, the echo chambers, and the addiction — the sprinkles on top of the social media ice cream sundae…
Your Influencer Can Lead You Astray
So far we’ve covered the influencers aren’t transparent (shocking!), they are playing the game (also shocking!) but now, what about when they decide to change directions and leave you high and dry?
As I followed Jack Butcher’s journey from 2020 until this summer, I watched him roll out some variable digital products, merchandise, etc. Seemed like things were going quite well for his business.
And you could see his disciples EVERYWHERE online. And they seemed to be having success also. 16k followers, 46k followers, 50k followers, and so it goes.
Having taken Jack’s courses, I can guarantee with almost 99% accuracy that all three listed above took Jack’s courses or took a course from someone who took Jack’s course.
Jack goes into great detail about building an online audience, creating content across multiple social platforms, even goes as far as creating and sharing his tool for content called and I quote, “the prolific production matrix” for helping you with those 14 hours a week of content creation we’re all supposed to be doing.
But here’s where it gets interesting…
I will not be the first to tell you that social media is toxic, highly addictive, and has had huge mental & and even physical health consequences around the world. Facebook as upended democratic elections, Twitter helped a president spread lies for years — on and on it goes.
Perhaps Jack’s courses (continuing to use him as an example here) have helped many make money online, bring in side-incomes, and maybe even quit their full-time jobs in the name of entrepreneurship. Amazing, all wonderful things.
But unfortunately, we don’t live in vacuums — everything has an equilibrium.
I have 1,700 followers on Twitter at the time of this writing and I suspect I’ll lose a few after this article goes live. I already find social media addicting, depressing, and affecting my mental health.
I’m no rocket scientist, but I don’t think you get LESS addicted as you get MORE followers. There’s just even more dopamine hits, you become more and more dependent on it.
So, you could argue the Jacks of the world either helped people become more profitable on social media or more addicted to social media, or perhaps — both.
And then, this summer, I get this email from Jack:
What stands out to you? For me, this had me fuming:
“Social media is an incredible tool for building networks, but it also has an incredibly short half-life. Since becoming a dad, my desire to spend massive amounts of time on social platforms has decreased dramatically.”
And with that email, boom. He launched a $50 course to help you move from social media to SEO.
But, woah woah, let’s dissect here:
- he’s admitting to social media being addicting (yea duh, we all know that)
- he’s admitting that being a new father, maybe made him question this addiction (like many of us around the world are grappling with — a serious global issue)
- And now, after either directly or indirectly helping to get the Elliots, Janis’, and Alex’s of the world addicted to social media, he will profit off of helping you undo the exact thing he profited off of helping you do in the first place.
I’m not trying to unfairly pick on the Jack’s, Justin’s of the world. They can do what they please.
But the reality is you can replace Jack or Justin with any other influencer in almost every other field and the dangers remain.
So, does any of this matter?
At this point, the critics will say, ‘Zach, these guys aren’t doing harm, they’ve helped people become creators, builders, bring in income, make a living online, and more, leave them the f*** a lone.”
And that’s valid. But I fear, the problem has already become systemic. You can replace “Jack” with any influencer in any industry — it’s everywhere.
And the challenge lies in the systemic impacts — especially when taken at scale.
The work of the influencer is narcissistic, rooted in self-promotion, addictive, dangerous, lacks in credibility or expertise, and further perpetuates a world of the haves and the have nots — you either have a large following online or you don’t. You either do it this way and be successful like me, or you don’t.
It drives home a comparative culture, a feeling of self-doubt, an inability to be truly happy in the present moment, and what seems to be exploding every day — imposter syndrome.
I know, because it happened to me.
It lacks credibility, expertise, and experience.
And, I’d go a step further to argue, this is not solving any real problems.
In a world ravaged by poverty, income inequality, systemic racism, religious & sexual persecution, and climate change, we’ve got some serious things to deal with.
Perhaps, we’d all be better off being a bit more pre-occupied with how we are going to get our society, our global neighbors, our co-habitants (aka animals) out of this mess, and less with the the, “75 things someone on twitter with no kids and a full bank account told me I should do before 5 am” or “the latest course that is going to make me marginally more productive at a cost to my mental health for only $199).
Because the capital T truth is (RIP David Foster Wallace) is we’ve lost the privilege to not care anymore. That ship sailed a long time ago.
And today, you can make a living and do good in this world. (no, no, like actual good.)
(In Part II is now live. “The Influencers Lied, so now what?”)
Z
